Helen Dunmore: facing mortality and what we leave behind | Books | The Guardian

In my new novel, Birdcage Walk, I write about a small group of radicals in Bristol at the end of the 18th century. It is the time of the French Revolution, when "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive", when idealism and curiosity blazed through a thousand speeches, pamphlets and poems, when speakers toured mills and factories and women wrote about that impossible but almost imaginable future when human rights might be for human beings rather than for men only, and when those doubly silenced might be allowed a voice.